You have a bunch of lines in your head and they prevent you from appreciating how amazing the act of being truly is. Ideas like responsibilities, rules, status, obligations, and problems prevent us from engaging with the incredible world around us. Because we are so busy in our heads, we are tone deaf to the music that exists everywhere.
Children’s brains are wide open. There is zero judgment at the start. Slowly, preferences are constructed via experience. They establish ideas like permanence, possession, and expectation. This is why kids will often calm with a parent after fussing for even the nicest stranger.
Over time kids are taught a set of beliefs either directly or through subconscious exposure. This includes everything from the languages we know, to 10’s based math, to the concepts of north, legal, correct and border. People then then apply those thought-judgments to all kinds of situations and in doing so they then cut themselves off from potential responses that they feel are outside their identity; outside their belief system.
This all means that people’s egocentric reactions are dictated by their identity, which is nothing more than a rigid sculpture created by whatever remains after everything that is outside the belief system gets removed. You don’t build a healthy identity by avoiding what you’re not. You become all that you are by advancing the things that are important to you.
If you do anything that’s physically or intellectually stimulating and enriching and yet requires real effort, then make that your work. Move not between the barriers of certainty and predictability and instead move toward heart, passion and love. Either love what you do, or love those you do it with. The rest is slavery.
Meditate on your beliefs. What ideas do you have that limit you? When you listen to the radio and a news story comes on and you react to it, who is reacting? What is it you care about and where did that sensitivity come from? Know yourself. Be aware of your limiting ideas so that you can dismiss those borders as you reach them. Open up your eyes, your ears, your hands, your nose and your mouth to the universe. Sing, dance, laugh, cuddle, play, make love.
We spend half our life trying to build a successful identity. If we’re awake, what we learn from those life experiences is that we should spend the second-half of life shedding that identity. With fewer opinions come fewer conflicts. With fewer beliefs comes increased freedom.
If you function knowing that the world is already perfect in its unfolding then there is nothing to fix or accomplish. We are here to explore and uncover the mysteries of the universe and creation. So the next time you’re outside in the summertime, kneel down and watch some bugs. You might just find that the healthy open child is still alive inside you, and that all you had to do was slow down enough to see again.
The fences and borders you’re crossing are only brought alive by you thinking them into existence. Do not be limited by your beliefs. Do not look for the right team, or idea, or party, or concept. Shed all of that for love. Trust love. The Greeks had a lot of different words for all of the different manifestations of it. Move toward any of those and you can be assured that you are in fact, being healthy. And that is the only kind of success that’s really worth believing in.
Have a wonderful day.
peace. s
Scott McPherson is an Edmonton-based writer, public speaker, and mindfulness facilitator who works with individuals, companies and non-profit organizations locally and around the world.
I help people achieve better mental health by teaching them about reality.
“We spend half our life trying to build a successful identity. If we’re awake, what we learn from those life experiences is that we should spend the second-half of life shedding that identity. With fewer opinions come fewer conflicts. With fewer beliefs comes increased freedom. If you function knowing that the world is already perfect in its unfolding then there is nothing to fix or accomplish.”
I love this Scott! I am, indeed, living my second-half of life and I surely am shedding the identity I felt through the years I was required to create, mostly by expectations I put upon myself. The influential people in my life during those years all had strong opinions and beliefs and my subconscious was asking what was so important about being black and white about matters of the world, the News, politics, whatever. However, my ego was saying I had to be part of that conversation to prove I was as smart, as well read, as involved. The Barriers of Belief is so very comforting. Does this make sense? Happy Halloween!
Your happiness and gratitude make perfect sense to me. 🙂 Happy Halloween to you too. And with that you remind me to do a Halloween themed blog next year….